I finally got onto doing something about my e-mail situation this weekend. For ages I've had very little spam and have been using Eudora (when something has been working for you for 5+ years it's hard to switch) but lately the stock "pump and dump" spammers have been doing their best to annoy me. Since Qualcomm announced this thing about Eudora and I needed better filtering I decided to go ahead and switch over to Thunderbird.

But.. I didn't want to just have better filtering on my system.. I wanted the stuff filtered better before it got to my inbox. The problem was the spammers had gotten crafty and started training my SpamAssassin Bayesian filter to let their e-mails through as "ham". I needed a way to take the spam that slipped through and use it to retrain SA, but my web hosting provider didn't have a system set up to do that.

Here's what I found (I don't use Lunarpages, but was able to modify the script a little and get it working).

I also cleared out the existing Bayesian filter files from SA since they were totally overrun with false ham. The whitelist list was several hundred kb of addresses that the spammers had used in the past. blech!

Anyway, so far I like Thunderbird a lot.. and I'm already seeing spam getting caught by the SA Bayesian filter. Woohoo!

Oh.. I was in Washington, DC last week for meetings. That's why no blog posts from me. The meetings were productive and the Smithsonian air and space museum was awesome.